Things fall apart, the center cannot hold

I’m taking a break.  I’ll be back on Sunday.  For some reason the current crisis reminded me of the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats.  Here it is:

THE SECOND COMING     Turning and turning in the widening gyre     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;     Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,     The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere     The ceremony of innocence is drowned;     The best lack all conviction, while the worst     Are full of passionate intensity.     Surely some revelation is at hand;     Surely the Second Coming is at hand.     The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out     When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi     Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;     A shape with lion body and the head of a man,     A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,     Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it     Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.     The darkness drops again but now I know     That twenty centuries of stony sleep     Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,     And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,     Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? We are not a third world country.  We are less than that.  We have a tiny minority willing to sell our country down the river to uphold a discredited ideology.  Today’s economic data show that we are not recovering from our economic problems.  Republicans in Congress hope that in 2012 they will win it all.  They may, but look for economic chaos, loss of faith, cynicism run rampant, and a country that I love in an irreversible decline.   I’ll be back on Sunday.